MOVIBES

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

The latest results from PISA are released today. Before you look to see how well your country performed on the triennial test of 15-year-olds students around the world, consider this: only 20 short years ago, there was no such thing as a blog. If it weren’t for science and technology, not only would you not be reading this right now, but there wouldn’t be the device on which you’re reading it – or countless other gadgets, medicines, fibres, tools… that have become all but indispensable in our lives.

Obviously, we don’t all have to be scientists to live in the 21st century. But an understanding of some basic principles of science – like the importance of experiments in building a body of scientific knowledge – is essential if we want to make informed decisions about the most pressing issues of our time (or even if we just want to choose the “healthiest” option for lunch).

PISA 2015 focused on students’ performance in and attitudes towards science. More than half a million 15-year-olds (representing around 29 million students) in 72 countries and economies sat the test. Today is the day we find out whether students around the world can take what they have learned in school and use it to solve problems they might encounter in “real” life.



So tap into the world’s most comprehensive set of data on learning. You’ll probably learn something, too.

Links:
PISA 2015 Results (Volume I): Excellence and Equity in Education
PISA 2015 Results (Volume II): Policies and Practices for Successful Schools
PISA 2015 Results in Focus
PISA 2015 Résultats à la loupe
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Tomorrow, the OECD will publish the 2015 PISA results. The world’s premier global metric for education will tell us which countries have the best school systems, based on the performance of 15-year-olds in science, mathematics and reading over a two-hour test. 

PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) was introduced in 2000 and held every three years since. The test is of skills, not knowledge: what you can do with what you know is what counts. But over time the emphasis has shifted. The focus today is whether students can think like a scientist, reason like a mathematician and distinguish between good and bad arguments in a written text. We live in an era of unimaginable technology breakthroughs, conflicting values and threatened political norms. Literacy, in all three of the foundational domains, is the key to making sense of the world and shaping it for the better - for everyone, not just elites.

The value of PISA lies in comparison. Countries look beyond their borders for evidence of effective policy and PISA provides a yardstick for evaluating success. It ranks the performance of countries on quality, equity and efficiency. And by picking out the characteristics of high-performing systems, it allows educators to identify successful policies and adapt them to local contexts.   

In the last PISA round, in 2012, the best performing countries were in Asia. Asian countries took the top five spots in both mathematics and reading and the top four in science (with Finland in fifth place). But behind the headlines lie important insights. In Estonia and Finland there were only small variations in student scores, showing that quality can go hand-in-hand with inclusion. In Canada, Macao and Hong Kong, socio-economic disadvantage among students had relatively less impact on individual performance: poverty is one thing, destiny quite another.  

So what will we learn from PISA 2015? For the first time in a decade, the report concentrates on science. Has science education improved? Around the world, have 15-year-olds got better at explaining phenomena scientifically, designing scientific enquiry and interpreting data scientifically? Is the gender gap in science education closing? Have poorer students caught up? And where countries have maintained high performance or improved from where they were, what were the factors? Where should the balance lie between additional investment, great teaching and coherent long-term leadership?

The global stakes are high, first because of growing demand for scientists in the workplace, second because every one of us needs a scientific perspective. The demand for scientists comes from the transformational impact of science and technology. Given the accelerating pace of invention and innovation, its vital that countries prepare more young talent for more jobs in hard science - and for many other jobs with a science dimension. The broader need for scientific literacy stems from the centrality of science to everyday decisions. Whether buying toothpaste, recycling household waste or attending a meeting on the local effects of global warming, we are all subject to science-based claims and counter-claims. Can we separate substance from spin, identify misrepresentations and assess levels of uncertainty and trustworthiness?  Post-truth politics is the neologism of the year and in some quarters expertise itself has become a dirty word. It is time to stand our ground – to insist on education as the key to civilised societies.

In many countries, educators are talking not only about skills but also values and attitudes. Singapore, Australia, Canada, Estonia and Finland – all of them among the top performing countries in previous PISA cycles - are rebuilding curricula around new forms of competence, such as critical and inventive thinking, global awareness and collaboration. They see values such as tolerance and respect as foundational. PISA too is developing rapidly. Next year we will publish the results of an additional 2015 assessment of collaborative problem solving, and we have advanced plans for assessing inter-cultural sensitivity in 2018. Creativity, entrepreneurship and ethical thinking are all under consideration for future cycles.

But with the seventy PISA countries and economies, the OECD believes that the bedrock of a good education should continue to lie in science, mathematics and reading. Literacy in all three offers prosperity, fulfilment and a chance to contribute to the well-being of others. Tomorrow, PISA 2015 will tell the world about its progress.  

PISA 2015 Global launch events

The OECD and Education Policy Institute will host a global launch event in London at the Institute of Directors with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría and Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills.

The event will be live streamed from 09:45 – 12:20 GMT

This will be followed by on online public Q & A session starting at 2:00 GMT with Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills. Questions in advance of the session will be welcome, using the #OECDPISA hashtag on Twitter and via the OECD PISA Learning Community

Links:
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

by Pablo Fraser
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills


Education’s purpose is to prepare children for a fast-moving, ever-changing world. Teaching faces the additional challenge of classrooms becoming increasingly more culturally diverse. Now, more than ever, this requires an adaptation of current teaching strategies.

The recent OECD working paper Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data seeks to be a contribution to this debate, by providing information about the teachings strategies used by mathematics teachers in eight countries.

What is the TALIS-PISA link database?

In TALIS 2013, participating countries and economies had the option of applying TALIS questionnaires to a PISA 2012 subsample with the purpose of linking data on schools, teachers and students. We call this option the "TALIS-PISA Link" database. The TALIS-PISA Link provides us with valuable information about teaching strategies and their relationship with the characteristics of the school, the classroom and student's outcomes. A better understanding of these relationships can help teachers, schools, education policy makers to design more effective policies with the aim of improving the learning achievements of all students.

What are the most common used strategies used by teachers?

The analysis of the data showed that teaching practices can be classified in three groups:

• Active learning strategies, which consist of promoting the engagement of students in their own learning. They typically include practices such as group work, use of information and communication technology, or student self-assessment.
• Cognitive activation, which consists of practices capable of challenging students in order to motivate them and stimulate higher-order skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving and decision making.
• Teacher-directed instruction, which encompasses practices based on lecturing and rely to a great extent on a teacher’s ability to deliver orderly and clear lessons.

It would be inappropriate, however, to favour one form of strategy over another, since all of them contribute towards student learning – depending on the student’s skills and the context. For example, data has shown that students exposed to teacher-directed strategies are slightly more likely to respond to the less complex items in the PISA mathematics evaluation, while cognitive activation strategies seem to be moderately related to solving more complex maths items. However, these associations appear to be tenuous and further explorations on the association of these strategies with student learning are needed.

The results of the report showed that teacher-directed practices and cognitive activation practices are the strategies more often reported. Three out of four teachers reported presenting “a summary of recently learned content” (teacher-directed practice) or that they “go over homework problems that students were not able to solve” (cognitive activation practices). However, only around one-third of teachers reported engaging frequently in active learning strategies. Indeed, the frequency in which active learning practices are used seems to be particularly low for mathematics teachers. The lack of engagement in these strategies may indicate that the necessary support and policies that would allow teachers to develop these strategies are not in place.

What are the policies and the support that could foster the use of active learning strategies?

The working paper evaluated the association of active learning with a myriad of factors located at the school, the classroom and the teacher levels. One of the most interesting results is that in all the eight participating countries, teacher self-efficacy showed as being positively associated with the implementation of active learning practices: the more the teacher feels confident in his or her ability to provide quality instruction, the more likely he or she will be to engage in active learning strategies. Indeed, teachers must feel confident in their abilities in order to implement relevant teaching strategies.

Also, when teachers dialogue, support and exchange materials with their colleagues, they are more likely to engage in active learning practices. Teachers should not work as isolated agents, but rather to engage in professional networks and in collaboration with colleagues.

What education policies can best support teachers’ self-efficacy?

Results from TALIS 2013 have shown that the level of self-efficacy among teachers in a country is highly correlated with teachers’ participation rates in professional development. The more teachers participate in training activities, the more confident they feel about their ability to teach, and the more they use active learning strategies. If professional development is not available at the school, school leaders could try to foster other types of initiatives, such as mentoring programmes.

What can schools do to promote collaboration among their teachers?

School leaders can provide opportunities for fostering relationships among their staff in school by giving them a physical space where teachers can meet, or allowing time away from administrative work for teachers to meet and develop a relationship with their colleagues.

Teachers everywhere are committed to helping their students achieve the best they are capable of. The OECD, through the study of the TALIS-PISA Link data, seeks to provide guidelines on how to support them. The study findings can inspire teachers and school leaders to co-operate using a wider palette of techniques to meet the needs of students with varying abilities, motivation and interests. The insights provided here can also inspire education policy makers to design teaching policies that could foster the implementation of innovative teaching strategies.

Links:
OECD Education Working Paper No. 148: Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data
OECD Education Working Paper No. 130: How teachers teach and students learn: Successful strategies for school
OECD Education Working Paper No. 115: Examining school context and its influence on teachers: linking TALIS 2013 with PISA 2012 student data
Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data brochure
Asia Society (2016), Teaching and leadership for the twenty-first century: The 2016 International Summit on the Teaching Profession
TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning
A Teachers’ Guide to TALIS 2013: Teaching and Learning International Survey
Ten Questions for Mathematics Teachers ... and how PISA can help answer them
Icon credit: teacher by Hadi Davodpour, CC0 1.0, table source: OECD.

by Francesca Gottschalk
Consultant, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD



It is, therefore, no surprise that student performance in maths is not only a key indicator for potential academic achievement, but also of future employability and overall participation in our “knowledge economy” society. Without the ability to make sense of the numbers that surround us, one would be completely lost in our modern world (even with a smartphone in hand!).

The question of how we actually learn maths and whether everyone has the ability to do so is thus a crucial one and should be of interest to parents, teachers and policy-makers alike. A new Education Working Paper entitled “The Neuroscience of Mathematical Cognition and Learning” explores the development of numerical cognition and explains that numeracy is actually an innate skill, inherent in humans from birth and further enhanced through formal education. Research indicates that babies as young as one day old are able to judge whether different quantities of objects are equal or not, and by the age of six months, infants often have the ability to discriminate up to three or four objects. It is then through schooling that children learn basic numerical principles –  for example addition and subtraction tables – and the more their ability to process these becomes automatic, the more they are able to devote brain resources (such as attention and working memory) to more complex numerical tasks.

Another way in which we can see the development of innate numeracy skills is through language, as language and maths learning go hand in hand. In literate cultures, number symbols and counting are integral for learning more complicated maths functions that go beyond approximation and simple counting. Illiterate cultures have also developed various trading and counting systems, allowing them to quantify objects and carry out basic maths operations. French researcher Pierre Pica, who spent time examining Amazonian groups, reported that although these groups are illiterate and cannot count, they still exhibit basic trading and approximation systems (illustrated through their daily transactions). This suggests the universality of basic maths systems in the human brain and the importance of the development in tandem of advanced maths and literacy skills. In order to effectively perform arithmetic operations and subsequently learn more complex functions, we need to have culturally transmissible and understood number symbols, which presuppose literacy within a population.

If our numerical abilities are innate, and literacy rates across OECD countries are relatively high, why then are there so many people who struggle with maths? The answer lies in the complexity of learning more advanced maths, which involves many regions of the brain. While it may seem that learning addition and subtraction tables should be a breeze for many students, when we start looking at the complicated processes involved in these different systems, we can understand that disruptions in these pathways can have huge impacts on learning abilities. We can see these effects, for example, in students with developmental dyscalculia (DD) or maths anxiety. In DD, it is thought that there is a deficient level of connectivity between various brain regions, whereas maths anxiety involves a number of cognitive processes such as emotion regulation and attitudinal factors that can hinder maths performance and learning. For example, results to questions about anxiety towards mathematics in the 2012 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that students in low-performing countries tended to report higher levels of anxiety towards maths in comparison to countries scoring above the OECD average.

What does this mean for the teaching of maths in schools? This paper highlights the fact that there are neither “good” nor “bad” math learners. While there is the potential for students to suffer from various missteps in the maths path, the innate ability for humans to understand numbers and gain numerical skills shows promise even for those students who struggle to grasp basic mathematical concepts, and this is encouraging. For example, the new PISA report, “Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All”, illustrates how the use of innovative teaching methods can foster students’ motivation to overcome barriers in maths learning. If teachers and policy-makers better understand how maths learning occurs in the brain, we can start to uncover and implement new strategies to assist students in need, helping them keep their maths path as clear as possible.

Links:
Working paper No. 136: The Neuroscience of Mathematical Cognition and Learning, by Chung Yen Looi, Jacqueline Thompson, Beatrix Krause, and Roi Cohen Kadosh
Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science
Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All
Photo credit: Book shelf in form of head on formulas backgrounds @Shutterstock

by Chiara Monticone
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills
Mario Piacentini
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills



Films about mathematicians have become incredibly popular: many of us now know about John Nash’s beautiful mind. Fewer people have heard the extraordinary story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius of comparable stature to Nash. Ramanujan was nothing more than a promising 16-year-old student from a poor family in South India when he came across A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, a compilation of thousands of mathematical results used by English students. Starting from the textbook, Ramanujan taught himself mathematics. After failing to get into university in India, he sent a letter to one of the great scholars of that time, Godfrey Harold Hardy, who noticed his talent and invited him to Cambridge.  Hardy quickly understood that, in spite of his amazing feats in mathematics, Ramanujan lacked the basic tools of the trade of a mathematician. If he was to fulfil his potential, he had to acquire a solid foundation in mathematics. The Cambridge mathematician worked tirelessly with the Indian genius to harness his creativity to the then-current understanding of the field without destroying his confidence. One good textbook and one outstanding teacher changed the fate of a man and the evolution of number theory and analysis.

There are poor students like Ramanujan who show that achieving great results in their education and professional life is possible. But “possible” is not sufficient: education and social policy should make poor students’ success “probable”. This month’s PISA in Focus and a new OECD report, Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All show that millions of students around the world – especially those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds – often have few opportunities to develop their mathematics skills.

Many students who participated in PISA 2012 reported that they have hardly been exposed to fundamental concepts in mathematics, like arithmetic means or linear equations, which form the basis of the numeracy skills that they will need to thrive as adults. Disadvantaged students are even less exposed to these concepts. For example, the share of advantaged students who reported that they know well or have often heard the concept of quadratic function is 20 percentage points larger, on average across OECD countries, than the share of disadvantaged students who reported so; and the difference between these two groups of students is larger than 30 percentage points in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, New Zealand, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and Uruguay. The relationship between the content covered during mathematics class and the socio-economic profile of students and schools is stronger in countries that track students early into different study programmes, that have larger percentages of students in selective schools, and that transfer less-able students to other schools.

Exposure to formal mathematics tasks and concepts (involving equations or functions, for example) has an impact on performance, particularly on the most challenging PISA tasks; and differences in familiarity with mathematics are strongly related to the performance gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.  On average across OECD countries, differences in familiarity with mathematics account for about 19% of the performance difference between these two groups of students. In Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Korea, Portugal, Switzerland, Thailand and the United States, more than 25% of the performance difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students is related to familiarity with mathematics. The report shows that exposure to applied mathematics tasks (like working out from a train timetable how long it would take to get from one place to another) has a weaker association with performance in PISA, but can stimulate engagement with mathematics and boost self-confidence, particularly among low-achieving students.
 
Widening students’ opportunities to learn mathematics is not an impossible task, but it may require certain readjustments, from reforming the structure of the education system to improving curriculum focus and coherence, and sharing teaching practices that use time more effectively. For example, Finland, Germany, Poland and Sweden have reformed their school tracking systems to reduce the impact of socio-economic status on students’ access to mathematics and achievement. At the school level, some charter schools in the United States have shown that longer instruction time, individualised support to students, strict behaviour norms, a strong work ethic among students and high expectations for all students can improve the achievement of students in low-performing, disadvantaged schools. Teachers need to be supported in using pedagogies, such as flexible grouping of students or co-operative learning, that increase learning opportunities for all students in mixed-ability classes.

In the end, disadvantaged students’ success in mathematics should become a common tale, not a hyped, romantic screenplay for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Links:
Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All
PISA in Focus No. 63: Are disadvantaged students given equal opportunities to learn mathematics? Chiara Monticone and Mario Piacentini
PISA à la Loupe No. 63: Les élèves défavorisés bénéficient-ils des mêmes possibilités d’apprentissage en mathématiques? (French version)
Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City
Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools

by Bonaventura Francesco Pacileo
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills

When Tim Duncan, captain of the the US National Basketball Association’s San Antonio Spurs, was spotted wearing a T-shirt saying “4 out of 3 people struggle with math”, everyone realised that he was counting himself among those who have a hard time with fractions, making the joke even funnier. What is less funny, though, is that PISA 2012 results show that more than one in four 15-year-old students in OECD countries are only able to solve mathematics problems where all relevant information is obvious and the solutions follow immediately from the given stimuli.

As a professional basketball player, Tim Duncan would probably agree that hard work is a prerequisite for attaining individual goals. Working hard is also important in education. According to this month’s PISA in Focus and the recently published report Low-performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How to Help Them Succeed, most low-performing students share a common trait: they lack perseverance.

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, when students are asked to solve problems requiring some effort, low-performing students are more likely to report that they give up easily. Across OECD countries, 32% of low-performing students reported that they give up easily when confronted with a difficult mathematics problem compared to only 13% of top performers. Differences between the two groups are largest in Jordan, Portugal, Qatar, the Slovak Republic and the United Arab Emirates. This might lead us to conclude that these struggling students are largely responsible for their own academic failures, since they have ultimate control over how much effort they invest in their schoolwork.

But evidence from PISA tells another narrative: low-performing students may be less engaged at school because they believe their efforts do not pay off. This disengagement is obvious when students are asked about the returns to their efforts. While 81% of top performers agreed that they feel “prepared for mathematics exams”, only 56% of low performers agreed with that statement. Low-performing students seem to quit studying when they see their work as an unproductive and unprofitable waste of time. But at the same time, low-performing students often engage in activities that require numeracy skills. Perhaps surprisingly, they are actually more likely to play chess or to be members of a mathematics club.

The good news is that these kinds of activities may be exactly what could help low-performing students develop better study habits. PISA finds that interest in mathematics is greater among students who do mathematics as an extracurricular activity compared to students who do not, and this positive association is stronger among low-performing students. These additional learning opportunities, which could help students gain self-confidence and find enjoyment in mathematics, could be exploited to narrow performance gaps among students.

As Tim Duncan would put it, students need a proper training court where they can learn how to become champions.